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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

Location data is being collected and sold by EU carriers. They just "anonymize" and/or aggregate the data before they sell it. And hey presto, it's suddenly "GDPR compliant". Of course we all know that no anonymized is ever really anonymous, and that aggregated data can be just as problematic.

Couple of sources, in Dutch: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/118145/belgische-provider-proxim... https://itdaily.be/nieuws/infrastructuur/proximus-orange-en-...

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thank you! I just found out i can opt out of this and did. However, selling anonymized data is better then selling non-anonymized data. Nevertheless, these carriers and the people who think this is in any way shape or form even remotely ok deserve to be stood in front of a wall...

can you explain how you opted out please? Thank you

i googled "anonymous data collection + $carrier + opt out" in german and they had a website

>no anonymized is ever really anonymous

Here's an anonymized email address, please tell me how to de-anonymize it:

    <redacted>@gmail.com

My point is that your hyperbolic statement is not true, and anonymization can be done correctly.

Location data isn't anonymous if you can follow the tracks of a single person throughout a week. Because where a person spends the majority of their time -- at work and at home -- are very personally identifiable. Then it doesn't matter if the dataset has "John Doe" or "<random id>" as the user identifier.

Don't believe "anonymous" data is shared like that? Look at what New York Times could do when purchasing one of these datasets.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca...

Yes it's hyperbolic and home-brew encryption can be safe too. It just almost never happens.

<redacted>@gmail.com + pfundstein is how it almost always fails.

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